Zugg Software :: View topic

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Just a curious question. Why is it that
#file number "path/filename.txt"
works but
#file number "pathfilename.txt"
doesn't?

The last one seems to open the filename.txt in zmud.exe directory and not in the dir beneath it. The first one is the one I prefer to use as it lets me have a clean zMUD folder, but it feels a bit wrong to use such a syntax.

Rorso
Currently using zMUD 6.40

Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2003 8:04 pm

Standardization

That's the best single word answer out there for it....

Mainly, the reason / is prefered over is because MOST things (save the win32 file accessing method) use / for directory access and not ....

Hence you have things like http://www.zuggsoft.com/forum/

where forum is referenced via the / character instead of a
Hopefully someday Microsoft will change their unstandard ways of referenceing with , but until then, we can only hope

Though, I can understand where this would get confusing for some people.... Might make a good addition to the help files (if it's not already there, I didn't look to deep)

Icechild
mv -f message.text /dev/null

MASTER Joined: 28 Nov 2000 Posts: 4817 Location: USA

Perhaps Zugg will enlighten us, but I wouldn't blame it on standardization. The use of in paths is the STANDARD method for both Windows and MS-DOS and dates back at least to the early 1980's, long before most of us ever even heard of the Internet. Since zMUD is specifically designed to work with Windows as the operating system, it's rather strange that it deviates from the standard path syntax but I'm sure Zugg has reasons.

It's not worth arguing over though. The important point here is that zMUD will open the desired file in the desired directory, but only if you use / rather than .

LightBulb
Senior Member

Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2003 2:31 am

True, I guess it's not exactly "standard" in the MS-DOS/Windows world. (Sorry, that's my unix/linux familiarity comin out)

Another (possibly more to the point) reason is many languages use the key as an escape character (such as n for newline in C). When parsing, it would be much less of a hassle to force people to use the / character instead, as that is rarely reserved in languages. (Atleast, in the ANSI standard for the language)

Sorry if my previous one didn't make much sense. It's just one thing that I've always considered.

Icechild
mv -f message.text /dev/null